Purdue Startup Oaken Launches New Digital Tool for Managing Farmland Partnerships
Oaken, an ag tech company setup by Purdue University’s DIAL Ventures, announced the launch of a new cloud-based landpartner CRM application for farmers. This first release gives farmers an easy way to manage their landpartner interactions from contact management, contract management and payments. This helps farms stay on top of their landpartner relationships, build a growing data repository that can serve future generations and always be well-equipped for every landpartner meeting.
Every farmer knows the importance of landpartner communications to their business. With rising competition for farmland and with conversations around succession planning top of mind for farmers and landowners alike, landowner communications have never been more critical.
“Oaken is a platform that growers have designed for growers; The team has worked for over a year to get feedback on the features so farmers can be assured that their landpartner relationship is in safe hands,” said Shashi Raghunandan, CEO, Oaken.
Until now, farmers have had few options and have typically used make-shift systems like manual folders or spreadsheets. The challenge is that these systems introduce more work and just don’t do an efficient job of keeping track of the various activities that go into managing landpartner relationships. That is why Oaken organizes growers’ data and documents to save time, allowing growers to focus more on maintaining communications and building strong relationships with their land partners.
“I used to spend hours just keeping track of events payments and contracts. The worst part of it was the constant thought of missing out on something critical,” said Kassi Tom Rowland, of Tom Farms in Leesburg, Ind. “Oaken has taken that worry from my life. I get notified by Oaken of all upcoming events, people I have not yet reached out to, contract renewals and payments. Not only do I not miss out on anything, but it frees my mind to focus on getting more work done.”
Oaken is working on providing seamless integration to existing accounting and farm management solutions and also a mobile app which will be available later in 2024. Additional information and a free 30-day trial can be found at www.oaken.ag.
You can also visit the Oaken booth #7215 at Commodity Classic in Houston between February 28 and March 2.